Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to service definitions for Web services and more particularly to generating Web services definitions for application instances.
Description of the Related Art
Web services represent the leading edge of distributed computing and are viewed as the foundation for developing a truly universal model for supporting the rapid development of component-based applications over the World Wide Web. Web services are known in the art to include a stack of emerging standards that describe a service-oriented, component-based application architecture. Specifically, Web services are loosely coupled, reusable software components that semantically encapsulate discrete functionality and are distributed and programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols.
Conceptually, Web services represent a model in which discrete tasks within processes are distributed widely throughout a value net. Notably, many industry experts consider the service-oriented Web services initiative to be the next evolutionary phase of the Internet. Typically, Web services can be defined by an interface such as the Web services definition language (WSDL), and can be implemented according to the interface, though the implementation details matter little so long as the implementation conforms to the Web services interface. Once a Web service has been implemented according to a corresponding interface, the implementation can be registered with a Web services registry, such as Universal Description, Discover and Integration (UDDI), as is well known in the art. Upon registration, the Web service can be accessed by a service requestor through the use of any supporting messaging protocol, including for example, the simple object access protocol (SOAP).
System administrators of enterprise networks generally desire both to view certain applications, including middleware, as service catalogues and also to manage the applications as services so as to better govern the life cycle of an application. In addition, system administrators prefer to reuse services like Web services by analogously invoking application endpoints. Generally, for the system administrator to govern the life cycle of an application and to reuse services, the application is most conveniently described as a Web service according to a WSDL document. But this is not the case for many applications; therefore, requiring a system administrator to provide all the necessary information in order to create a WSDL document using a text editor or tooling provided by another application. This requires the system administrator to have a superior understanding of the system.
In addition, manually creating a WSDL document for an existing application instance is both labor intensive and also impractical as there are often a large number of middleware applications running against different central applications in a production environment. In addition, the system administrator may not know all the applications running on the system or what many of the applications do.